Important critical concepts of T.S Eliot (MEG 5 - Literary criticism and theory)

 

Tradition and Historical Sense

In the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Eliot explains his notion of tradition. Tradition is not the blind devotion towards previous generations, neither imitation nor mere repetition. Tradition can be attained through historical sense. Historical sense is a perception that past has a purpose in the present. According to Eliot: "the historical sense involves a perception, not only the pastness of the past, but of its presence [...] this historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless and of the temporal, is what makes a writer traditional." Eliot continues to say that this historical sense of tradition makes a writer conscious of his/her place in history, his contemporaneity. Historical sense helps the writer to become aware of the continuity of literature where he/ she realizes his/her position among others from Homer to his contemporaries, which helps to "form a continuous literary tradition". No poet has an independent meaning or significance of his/her own. The past writers are significant in the present. This comparison is made for the purpose of analysis and it is reciprocal. Past helps us to understand the present and the present throws light on the past. Tradition to Eliot is the classics and other great literature of the past like the metaphysical poetry. This historical sense helps a writer to escape his personality.

 

Impersonality theory of poetry

Eliot rejected the romantic theory that poetry is an expression of artist's personality, Poetry is an experience which has a value beyond the poet. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality". asserts Eliot. His impersonal theory of poetry has two aspects. Firstly, all poetry that has ever written is a continuum(a sequence), a living whole, despite the fact they are written by different poets. Second one is the special relationship of a poem to its author. Eliot states in his "Tradition and Individual Talent": "The poet has no personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar unexpected ways." 

Like an empiricist which he was, Eliot evokes the image of a catalyst in a chemical reaction. According to Eliot, the degree of impersonality in poetic creation will be greater with the greater artists. He states; "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." This impersonality can be achieved only when the poet acquires a sense of tradition and the historic sense which make him conscious of the present and past.




Objective Correlative 

 
The term first used by American painter Washington Allston in 19century, was revived famously by Eliot in his famous essay on "Hamlet and his Problems" (1919) to designate a concept which later became a major concern of the 20 century literary criticism. According to Eliot, since the poet cannot transfer his emotions or ideas directly to the readers, there should be a mediation to evoke the same. In his own words, "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative', in our other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion." In short, objective correlative is a situation or event designed by the poet which symbolizes or objectifies a particular emotion to evoke the same emotion in the reader. Objective correlative can be called as a medium through which the transaction between author and reader inevitably takes place. The reader responds to the object or medium and through that, to the poem. A famous. exemplification presented by Eliot is from Macbeth. In 'the sleep walking scene', Shakespeare uses the act of unconscious recollection of the horrific crime by Lady Macbeth as a correlative to convey the mental agony to the spectators objectively. A great work of art, according to Eliot, is a set of conceptual symbols or correlatives which attempt to express the emotions of the poet. He also remarks in the essay that Hamlet is an artistic failure as Shakespeare failed to constitute the objective correlative.


 

Dissociation of Sensibility

It refers to the way in which the intellectual thought was separated from the experience of feeling in the seventeenth century poets like Milton and Dryden.

Eliot put forward the idea of 'dissociation of sensibility in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets"(1921). He makes the idea clear in the following words:

The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido  or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered, and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden."

Good poetry represents 'unification of sensibility, Eliot insisted. Thoughts are transformed to feelings. Then poetry is transfused by a union of the two which is poetic sensibility. But when the poet is unable to convert his thoughts to feelings, the result is 'dissociation of sensibility, the split between thoughts and feelings. Eliot says that this happened with the poets of late 17 century like Tennyson and (17 Browning. They think, but they could not feel their thoughts "as immediately as the odour of a rose" There is a clear disjuncture between thoughts and feelings. But this was not the case with the metaphysical poets. In them we could witness a unification of thought and experience Eliot compares the metaphysical poets like Donne, Marvell and Cowley with later poets like Gray, Goldsmith and Johnson and found that the former group of poets possesses finer sensibility.